


Babel

by Dark_Eyed_Junco



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Language Barrier, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 16:24:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10575048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Eyed_Junco/pseuds/Dark_Eyed_Junco
Summary: The tower comes down.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinkish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkish/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Problem with French-Canadians](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6734434) by [pinkish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkish/pseuds/pinkish). 



> In addition to the original fic, also inspired by a short story by Ted Chiang. Though not as good. And the Bible too, I guess. 
> 
> Malkin's speech is just meant to denote gibberish. I did not encode any secret messages into it.
> 
> Thanks to thedeadparrot for the beta and for the knowledge on remix challenges.

 

As a child he played at the bottom – it stretched forever on either side, left, right, above. Sid didn't know anyone who had ever walked the whole way around, or gone all the way to the top. He used to like to scavenge through the trash littering the grounds. Dung baked dry by the sun, fragments of egg shells and pottery, animal bones large and small. Sometimes he would find things of value dropped careless from a balcony or down the edge: a tool, a keepsake, a bit of gold or a semi-precious gem, dull pieces of copper or bronze, shattered bitumen ladles and wooden trowels broken into a thousand pieces. Once he found a body. One day he found a boy named Geno. One day, and then many many days after.

As a man he chopped wood for the kilns to keep them running day to fire mountains and heaped mountains of bricks. Higher, higher, higher.

**

They're on the road. Many, many people passed this way before them. Whole tribes, whole nations. The path is grooved with wheels and scattered across the scrub on either side are the soot of dead campfires, along with discarded belongings and dug-out latrines.

Sid is leading the donkey today. Geno has stretched his long body out on the cart, among tools and fuel and clothes and food and feed and water. He was sleeping before, but now he's awake. His hands are clasped together and resting on his stomach. There's a straw in his mouth and two fat black flies pestering him.

Far behind them, the tower is in three parts. The top is crowned in a smokeless fire; black tar runs down the sides. The middle has vanished. There's a white fog or mist in its place. The base is crumbling away in great sloughs of fine sand that fall to the earth with a rumble and a crash – earthquake and thunder – every few hours.

The donkey's ears flicker; his ambling pace picks up. Just a little faster.

**

All they knew at the time was that the builders were close. Close to the top, close to the end, close to God. Gossip took over the woodcutters: the tower was meant to hold up the vault of heaven and prevent it from opening up in another great deluge, or the king was going to ascend and live above the clouds. Or they had fired a mighty terracotta statue of a warrior in pieces, which they would assemble together with copper rods at the top to serve as a threat and a warning. Or they were sending actual warriors, spears and axes lain in between layers of bricks on the carts. As many stories as there were mouths to tell them.

They were logging some distance from the tower, at the foot of the Zagros mountains. Great forests of cedar once grew here, or so Sid was told. Most cleared down now, burned. They had come back to camp after a long day felling trees and in the distance, as the sun set, they had seen a great fire high in the sky.

The first thing Sid had thought was Geno, still in the city with his family. Making bricks.

**

When it starts to get dark the donkey wants to stop, and it's no use arguing with a donkey. They stop to make camp. Geno builds a fire and they eat a meal together. From here it's only another day or so to where Flower and the others said they'd wait for him, in one of their old camps – a few makeshift houses surrounded by acres of tree stumps and young saplings.

Beyond that? Sid's not sure. The night wears on and the fire splutters and shrinks in and in and in on itself. No one speaks. Geno pokes at the coals with a stick, shaking the ash off red embers. In the dying glow, Sid looks across and studies his intent face. _Should you be coming with me,_ he wonders, for the hundredth time. But there's no point in asking.

**

He made the journey back to the city alone. Packed light and traveled fast. Or as fast as he could – there was a river of people flowing out, one mass exodus in his path. He was a fish swimming upstream. Carts, livestock, drivers with their long switches hissing through the air, cursing him with fat tongues, thick with anger and fear and worried impatience. To them he wasn't a person but an obstacle, something in the path and in the way.

Sid himself was in too much of a hurry, too numb and too sick at heart to hear and understand their words and their curses. They were road noise; they were nothing to him. Or he might have realized sooner.

On the last day, the way forward cleared. A few last desperate trickles of men, women, and children in the morning, and then nothing. The road ran straight as an arrow to the crashed down city smothered under a blanket of sand, which spilled out from the streets and alleys, filled the courtyards of houses and burst them apart from within like a fist opening.

The ruins of the city left him at a loss. He didn't know what to do or how to find who he was looking for, but he couldn't leave. He spent a day camped out, circling, calling out to the empty air, and in the end they did find each other.

There was a smudge of grime across Geno's left cheek and dust caked in the hair of his bare arms and his head was almost half sand, but he was otherwise demonstrably whole. Alive, warm, still breathing.

Sid reached out to pull him into an embrace. “I was so worried.”

Geno let himself be pulled in, opened his mouth and said, “AI-------rdou?”

**

Now, Geno looks up from the embers and first smiles back, then frowns. Sid is staring too hard, maybe, something like that. Geno stands and circles around the fire in two quick steps; Sid cocks his head back to him looming overhead. “What?” he asks him. Old habits die hard. “Don't stand over me. You're making me nervous.”

Geno shrugs and says something that sounds like birdsong. The dawn chorus. He puts a hand on Sid's shoulder: knuckles in the firelight; calluses on his fingers and across his palm.

Sid's heart softens. His head is turned towards the hand and there's a feeling like he's just about to lose his balance and tip over. He wants to put his nose against the bones of the wrist. “What?” he asks, this time quieter. He's only saying something because it doesn't seem right to stay silent.

The moon is bright tonight. Geno kicks dirt over the fire and then tugs up, up at Sid.

Sid lets himself be pulled up and urged towards the bundle of skins he brought with him from the woodcutter's camp. Now they've been spread across the ground to form a pallet. He looks down at them, a rough little bed, then back up at Geno. “You're still thinking about that with everything that's going on?”

There's an intent frown on Geno's face. He was watching Sid's face and now copies him to look down at the bed too, then suddenly starts to laugh. It's a very warm, hilarious kind of laughter, the kind that sometimes put tears in the corners of people's eyes. He shakes his head, almost helplessly, gives Sid's waist a small pinch, and then lowers himself to the ground in stages. First sitting, then lying on his back. He pats the space next to him.

Sid lies down, but keeps himself a careful distance apart. He feels a bit like he's been made the butt of a joke. “I don't understand how you're managing to take all this in your stride,” he tells Geno.

Geno says something that sounds like stones skipping across still water. He points his arm up at the sky.

It's clear tonight. Only a few scraps of floating cloud. Countless stars; one bright smoky lane and darker plains to either side. He spends time trying to make sense – pick out patterns, sketch out structures or the images of men and animals – before giving up. The stars were not placed by human hands and the night sky is unknowable.

Sometime during the gazing, he'd closed the gap between their bodies almost without conscious thought. With his fingers he's patiently working the sand out of Geno's hair, one lock at a time.

“You wanted to look at the stars with me,” he guesses finally; Geno nods in response. “Why are you nodding? You don't understand my speech anymore.”

Geno just shrugs a – what must be a, _So?_ at that.

So a lot of things, Sid wants to tell him. And maybe he will. In the morning, when his eyes aren't closing on him.

**

Today, Sid is in the cart. They're taking turns. Sometime during the first day of their journey Geno had picked up on their destination – he has a good head for maps and has visited Sid and the others there before – and now doesn't require any pointed direction. This morning he's pacing besides the donkey, swinging his arms and occasionally nodding like he's paying attention to or understands Sid.

Which he isn't and doesn't, of course.

“- do you see?” finishes Sid. “What about your family? You just left them? Are you able to find them again? As we are, you can't even tell me. Maybe we will never be able to speak to each other. Maybe this thing God has done cannot be undone. How are you so unworried?” It's nice to get it all out and off his chest, even if it was strictly for his own benefit. “Hah. That felt good.” He blows out a big breath.

Geno chooses that moment to look back. He's smiling. There's a very annoying twinkle in his right eye, like he's stored away a small star in there. He reaches back into the cart and pats Sid on the thigh.

Which starts Sid off again. “See?” he says. “This is what I mean. Stop teasing me.”

Now Geno starts to whistle.

“Geno!”

The one sound he does recognize is his own name. That is one hopeful sign. He turns and smiles again.

“Geno,” says Sid again, exasperated now. “Why aren't you more worried?”

He stops smiling and drops his stride a half step. Now he's pacing alongside the cart. He takes Sid's hand. Very big, very warm. Those calluses again.

“What?”

He squeezes.

“You trying to tell me something?”

Another squeeze.

“Something about how it's alright as long as we have each other?”

“Sid,” he says.

“Something about how you will keep the flies off me while I sleep?”

“Sid.”

Sid sighs, lets himself drift off to sleep. When he wakes, there's two flies picking their spindly way across his nose. He can just barely see them if he looks down his own face.

Of course. He doesn't know what he was expecting.

**

In the afternoon, they see the smoke from the camp's fires. “There they are,” says Sid.

Geno nods.

Flower notices them first when they arrive. “Look at that,” he says to Geno, grinning. “Still alive. Who would have thought.”

Sid watches the whole interaction with trepidation. “See,” he wants to say. “No one here speaks as you do anymore. Not a single person.”

But Geno just – rolls his eyes and sticks his tongue out. A second later the two of them are half-hugging, half-playfighting like nothing's the matter. And it goes like that with all the rest: Geno unbothered, greeting everyone; letting their dumb jibes (born out of relief) bounce right off him; chasing Tanger around the fire.

He seems perfectly at his ease, even if there's nothing but the sound of the fires and what must be as meaningless as the chirp of insects in his ears. Content. More than content: happy.

The only one holding back is Sid.

Like he can sense Sid's worry, Geno pulls back from the roughhousing – the others are having too much fun now and don't notice his absence. “Sid,” he says. For the first time since they met by the city, he does sound uncertain. Sid has made him uncertain. He puts out his hand. Different from earlier today, when he simply took. Now he's waiting.

“Yes,” says Sid. “Geno.” And he takes his hand.

 

 


End file.
